Mine's a G&S, thanks

Judi Connelli as Katisha, Anthony Warlow as Ko-Ko and David Hobson as Nanki-Poo in Opera Australia's latest production of The Mikado.
Picture: Danielle Smith

What makes people go nuts over Gilbert and Sullivan operettas? Carolyn Webb reports.

When people fall in love with Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, they fall hard.

Take Martin Wright: 12 years ago, when he was 10, he saw an amateur production of G&S's Pirates of Penzance in Geelong and was thrilled by the dramatic music, the witty words and the romance of the pirate heroes.

"I was hooked," says Wright, in a pun worthy of librettist William Schwenck Gilbert.

As his friends got into car racing and pop music, Wright immersed himself in G&S tapes, records and videos.

At 13, he joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria, and would travel by public transport from his Geelong home to the Phoenix Theatre in Burwood to see its performances.

At 14, having moved to Melbourne, Wright joined the productions, working his way up from chorus to major roles. He is now society secretary and musical director of its coming production of Ruddigore.

And, for his Melbourne University music thesis, completed last year, Wright did a new orchestral score of Arthur Sullivan's cantata, On Shore and Sea.

It's no fluke that the 14 G&S operettas have survived for 130 years. Most are in demand around the world, from local church drama groups to national opera companies.

Opera Australia executive producer Stuart Maunder says: "They are incredibly well crafted, universal pieces that appeal to your funny bone. They are funny, but they also have a touch of sentiment about them, which people tend to like. In one moment you can be laughing, the next moment you're . . . Well, not exactly in the depths of despair, but you certainly feel for the characters."

From Thursday, OA is performing G&S's ninth and most successful operetta, The Mikado.

The plot concerns Nanki-Poo, the son of the Mikado (emperor) of Japan, who is betrothed to the overbearing, older Katisha, but in love with a maiden, Yum-Yum.

I think people who say it's demeaning to do it, underestimate the skill required to put on G&S successfully. DIANA FAIZOULLINE

Nanki-Poo disguises himself as a wandering minstrel and finds Yum-Yum in the town of Titipu. But Ko-Ko, the town's Lord High Executioner, has chosen her for his wife. The State decrees that Ko-Ko must execute someone to meet his quota and Nanki-poo - in despair at losing Yum Yum - is a willing candidate.

Some critics have objected to OA devoting half its autumn season to an operetta. But Maunder, who is directing, says the critics aren't living in the real world.

"Is it to put bums on seats? Yes," says Maunder. "Yes, it's a shamelessly populist move, but then, we're a shamelessly populist company. We were forced into that. We have to get 70 per cent of our income from the box office. Now if that's not populist, I don't know what is. Something's got to pay for the art."

He says that takings from The Mikado will subsidise other OA autumn season productions including Norma and The Pearlfishers, but says it's not an unusual trend internationally.

"The thing that saves the English National Opera's bacon every few years is the revival of the Jonathan Miller Mikado. The New York City Opera has a Mikado production in their repertoire."

Maunder points out that last year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago tackled a dire financial position, and saved an estimated $1 million ($A1.38 million), in replacing Berlioz's opera Benvenuto Cellini with the crowd-pleasing, cheaper-to-stage Pirates of Penzance.

Diana Faizoulline, a Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria member since 1981 and now its webmaster, newsletter editor and membership secretary, says G&S is not necessarily out of place in OA's repertoire.

"I think people who say it's demeaning to do it, underestimate the skill required to put on G&S successfully," says Faizoulline, a soprano who has directed or acted in more than 50 society productions.

"It's harder than a normal musical. The singing is more demanding: you have multiple part harmonies throughout.

"As in opera, the songs contain a lot of the plot. It's not just, 'Oh it's time for a song' - the songs tell you the plot so you have to have good diction, have to really sell the song, or else people won't know what's happening."

Faizoulline says that some professional G&S shows she has seen have overdone the practice of updating the lyrics to include current issues.

"Or they'll add in too much slapstick, as if they're saying to the audience, 'You're not clever enough to get the humour: we have to hit you over the head with it'."

But, she says, OA "has the money and the resources to put on a good show - and I'm sure their audiences appreciate it as a change from the generally more serious operas".

"They certainly have the talent to sing it. Opera singers can't always sing musicals and music operas to save themselves. They focus too much on making a beautiful sound rather than the beautiful words," Faizoulline says.

"But, in OA's productions of G&S that I've seen, they haven't had a problem with diction and enunciation. They've done it well."

Maunder says OA's Mikado will be "extremely lavish" and "a very beautiful production to look at".

The stage is decorated with huge, faux china pots, oversized cushions and a red wardrobe. The costumes are "Anglicised Japanese".

"For example, all the gentlemen look like they've just come out of a bankers' meeting in England, so they've got pinstripe trousers; they've got the old school ties as their 'obis' around their waists.

"Titipu's 'three little maids from school' - Yum Yum, Pitti Sing and Peep Bo - wear kimonos in the style of St Trinians school uniforms - blue and white striped with ties and boater hats on their heads with chopsticks sticking through them."

Maunder says that with Anthony Warlow playing Ko-Ko, Judi Connelli as Katisha and David Hobson as Nanki-Poo, the production has assembled "a cast from God".

Donald Shanks and Jud Arthur will alternate in the Mikado role; John Bolton-Wood and Richard Alexander will alternate as Pooh-Bah, and Melbourne's Ali McGregor and Tiffany Speight will alternate as Yum-Yum.

As Maunder says, this preserves voices, given there are eight shows a week, and gives more artists a chance to perform.

Professionally, Maunder has acted in and directed G&S productions in England, the United States and Australia. But he started in amateur ranks. At age seven, he performed a walk-on role as midshipman Tom Tucker, dressed in a sailor suit, in a Boggabri Musical Society production of HMS Pinafore.

When he was 16, a teacher at Farrer Agricultural High School, in Tamworth, cast him as Sir Despard Murgatroyd in Ruddigore, a melodrama about the Murgatroyd family, whose ancestors have cursed them to commit a crime each day or die an agonising death.

The teacher lent Maunder a book of G&S lyrics and stage stories - "I just devoured it. I thought it was the most extraordinary genre."

Maunder snapped up a Decca re-release of G&S operettas on record, "and it just became an absolute obsession for me".

"For me, as a person who adored reading and plays and all that, it's like Coward, it's like Cole Porter and George Bernard Shaw - it's this absolute delight in using the language well."

At university, Maunder joined the musical society which did "a G&S production each year". After university, he won a stage management traineeship with OA, and, in 1978, stage-managed its production of G&S's Yeomen of the Guard.

Maunder went on to direct The Pirates of Penzance for the home of G&S, the D'Oyly Carte Company in London; Patience for the West Australian Opera, Trial by Jury for the Covent Garden Festival, and Iolanthe for OA's 2002 winter season.

In 1987, Maunder directed Warlow in A Song to Sing O, a one-man, musical play (written by Melvin Morrow) of Gilbert and Sullivan songs, told "through the eyes" of the great British G&S comedian, George Grossmith.

After 30 years, "worshipping at the G&S shrine", Maunder still loves them for their alliteration (such as in Mikado song I Am So Proud: "To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock/ In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock"); their poking of fun at pomposity; to their songs, of which, he says The Mikado contains "many of the great hits - Three Little Maids from School, Titwillow, Flowers That Bloom in the Spring".

Will Gilbert and Sullivan's popularity go on for another century?

"Without doubt. No question," says Maunder. "After the opening night of Gondoliers in 1889, Gilbert wrote to Sullivan saying, 'I must thank you for the magnificent work you put in to the piece. It gives one a chance of shining right through the 20th century with a reflected light'.

"It was the 20th century they were worried about, and there's no doubt that they've done that and they'll go through the next one as well."

Opera Australia's The Mikado, is at State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Thursday to May 29. See opera-australia.org.au

The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria's Ruddigore, is at Alexander Theatre, Monash University, from July 9 to 17. See www.gilbertandsullivan.org.au